◼ Judge skeptical of Obama in executive privilege fight - Josh Gerstein/POLITICO
Last June, the fight led President Barack Obama to assert executive privilege over the records of the controversial gun trafficking investigation, and to House votes finding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson spent most of an hour-and-a-half hearing Wednesday sharply questioning Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ian Gershengorn about the administration’s assertion that a lawsuit the House panel filed last year should be dismissed and the legislative and executive branches of government left to work out their differences by themselves.
“That lack of a judicial role is a deliberate part of the constitutional structure,” Gershengorn insisted, as he urged the judge to stick with the historic practice of the Congress and executive agencies sorting out such fights on their own.
“It has been messy. It has been contentious. It has been political … but it has worked,” he said.
Jackson, an Obama appointee, repeatedly suggested that Gershengorn was giving the judiciary short shrift.
“You keep talking about the two [branches] as if the third one isn’t there,” she said.
